Where The Newspaper Stands

Maybe it takes a different perspective to understand James City County Supervisor Michael Brown and some of the constituents he so eagerly represents.

Say you've worked long and hard, completed your career, raised your children and feel it's time to be good to yourself. You happen upon an advertisement, an appeal to those ready for retirement. It's alluring. All green, well-tended, secure, friendly and decorated with fairways.

So you sell your home in New York, Connecticut or wherever and pack off to Virginia and one of several James City County developments catering to the upscale retirement crowd. It works out great. There's bridge, golf, travel clubs, golf, decent restaurants and plenty of new, accomplished friends with similar interests.

But no sooner than you settle in, you hear that these people beyond the threshold of the retirement enclave actually expect you to pay local taxes and support local schools. Good grief, they even want you to help them build another high school. And, wow, look at this new assessment on your house.

It seems safe to say that most retirees ensconced in James City take a measure of the situation and realize that to retire is not to secede. They do the right thing by their new community, many of them contributing both time and talent -- as well as tax dollars -- to the common good.

Some, however, do not abide the situation at all, and Brown has given them a voice. Thus, during a recent board meeting, Supervisor Brown was bewailing the local tax burden and proposing property tax reductions to compensate for rising assessments, pandering to the worst instincts of the county's newest and, by any measure, most affluent residents.

In turn, it took all of three minutes for Supervisor John McGlennon to calmly dissect Brown's analysis -- which failed to account for the 70 percent decline in automobile property taxes -- and the proposal happily went away.

You can say that it takes some chutzpah to revel in and benefit from rising real property market values (the $500,000 houses of a few years ago are on the market for $750,000 or more; million-dollar house listings, once rare, are ho-hum common in James City), then complain about assessments based on that value.

But perhaps that misses the point. Brown has a perspective he shares with his vocal, letter-writing constituents and he will continue to act upon it.

There is another perspective. A larger one, that reveals that Virginia, on the whole, does very well by retirees. A low-tax state to begin with, Virginia further revised its tax laws in 1994, leaving experts saying that Virginia could well lay claim to the nation's most senior-friendly tax policy. The car-tax cut, passed in 1997, was historic in its dimensions and no one benefited more than the owners of the many luxury-automobiles that run up and down Route 199.

But it doesn't stop there. All you have to do in Virginia, in order to get a $6,000 state income tax deduction, is turn 62. Turn 65 and you get a $12,000 deduction. Why so? Why arbitrarily grant a deduction on the basis of age, without any consideration of an individual's wealth? Or, to sharpen the point, why should it be the policy of the commonwealth to grant a 62-year-old millionaire, living on a golf course, a substantial tax break -- especially when that effectively shifts more of the burden upon working families?

Policies that favor seniors who may be struggling with rising living costs would make sense. But that's been the trend for a long time generally, and according to Ken Dychtwald, respected author of "Age Wave," "If the nation were to pick one age group for special economic treatment because it was so poor and had bleak prospects for the future, statistics show that this group would not be the old, but the young."

Everything has consequences. The General Assembly is discovering that as it works through a decade of shortsighted fiscal policies that have left the state budget in fathoms of red ink.

James City County's leadership should avoid that path -- and it will be easier if all involved remember to take a measure of the world beyond their immediate interests. Again, it's all a matter of perspective -- and it's the broader perspective that's most needed in James City County, not the narrowest.

The park bonds

Funds will preserve habitats before it's too late

Virginia is a natural wonderland, with a tremendous diversity of environments, from coastal marshes to mountainside forests and everything in between.

But the relentless march of development is paving over and obliterating many of these habitats.

The park bond referendum on the ballot Tuesday will let Virginia preserve rare and fragile ecosystems -- before they're lost forever.